Dive Brief:

• CPS Energy awarded Clean Energy Collective (CEC) the contract, from among the five competing developers, to build the first community solar project in San Antonio. Financial and project capacity details were not disclosed.
• The business plan requires CEC to build a 1.2 MW solar array and, through its roofless solar program, market ownership of individual solar modules at a per-module fee to CPS Energy residential and commercial customers. Subscribers receive a monthly electric bill credit against their electricity consumption for the output of their modules.
• In June, NEC Retail awarded Clean Energy Collective a contract to build a community solar array to market module output to its residential and commercial customers in Corpus Christi and parts of the Eagle Ford shale region.

Dive Insight:

CEC has already picked sites in the CPS Energy- erritory and is expected to bring the community solar array online by the end of 2015. Single-axis trackers will rotate the modules as the sun moves across the sky, maximizing solar exposure, boosting power generation as much as 15% over a fixed array's output, and increasing subscribers’ return. CEC will prioritize the use of local resources during construction.

Community shared solar offers subscribers without solar-suitable roofs the benefits of owning solar such as reduced cost and long term fixed price electricity.

New data in the DOE’s Shared Solar: Current Landscape, Market Potential, and the Impact of Federal Securities Regulation shows an estimated 49% of households and 48% of businesses are unable to host solar. “By opening the market to these customers,” it reports, “shared solar could represent 32% to 49% of the distributed PV market in 2020, thereby leading to cumulative PV deployment growth in 2015 to 2020 of 5.5 GW to 11.0 GW, and representing $8.2–$16.3 billion of cumulative investment.”